Rails Day 1

I spent the past week or so learning Perl and really enjoyed it and learned a lot in the process. I’m no Perl expert, but I can write fairly basic scripts now and read Perl code fairly effectively. I’ve also done a fair bit of work writing Ruby scripts in the past week, successfully rewriting a Powerball simulator that I initially wrote in Perl, in Ruby.

While I enjoyed Perl, I wanted to move on and try and learn something else. I’ve always had a lot of respect for the Ruby and Rails communities and want to learn enough to be a real part of it. I’ve been attending local Ruby meetups and I’ve really enjoyed meeting members of the local Ruby community.

I’ve decided to start keeping a daily blog with a simple format, what I learned yesterday, what I’m going to do today, and what I expect to learn. This will help me keep a good grasp on where I’m at and allow other people to get an idea of things that might work for them.

What I learned yesterday: Yesterday I started working through Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial. I learned Django at The Iron Yard, so a lot of the concepts are familiar to me. I’ve only worked through the first chapter so far, so its been mostly introductory concepts. I did learn about scaffolding in Rails, which is pretty sweet, if a bit terrifying to have so much auto-generated code. Django does have generic views, but nothing like scaffolding to my knowledge.

What are you going to do today: Today my goal is to work through at least chapters 2-5 of Rails Tutorial. I expect to build my first Toy app with scaffolding, and then move on to start creating a Twitter clone without any scaffolding.

What do you expect to learn: I expect to learn about the ease of scaffolded code, then learn how to write similar code without the scaffold generator.